The current petroleum exploration and production environment, with emphasis on maximizing reservoir production with enhanced oil recovery (“EOR”) and intense competition for safely exploiting the unconventional hydrocarbon reservoir, dictates improvement in all phases of reservoir development cycles. Since the inception of hydrocarbon production, accuracy in reserve estimation, maximum achievable recovery estimation, and rate of production estimation, are basic questions that should be answered to assess oil recovery efforts. In the last thirty years or so, the industry has made significant strides in improving the means for providing answers to these questions. However, with many of the world's reservoirs at peak production and unconventional drilling methods taking the forefront, the need for improved data accuracy and delivery time to assist in decision making has gained importance. A need exists for accurate, cost effective assessment of reserve estimation, maximum achievable recovery, and potential rate of production that can be conducted in a timely fashion.
Moreover, in the oil industry it is imperative to evaluate reservoir rock and fluid interactions at formation temperature and pressure conditions. As reservoir fluids are produced, temperature, pressure, fluid phase, fluid composition, and rock behavior is constantly changing due to changes in temperature, pressure, and other parameters. These changes need to be modeled, and their effect on reservoir production needs to be understood. For this purpose, proper test equipment, test design, and various sensor technologies needs to be employed, to generate data that could predict reservoir behavior from exploration to abandonment. Furthermore, the test techniques and test equipment need to be sophisticated so as to properly analyze unconventional reservoirs, such as shale gas, tight gas sand (TGS), heavy oil, tar sand, hydrates, and depleted enhanced oil recovery reservoirs. Successful design and implementation of any unconventional reservoir or FOR mechanism (such as water, steam, chemical, thermal, and biological mechanisms) must be studied under a correct set of reservoir conditions to obtain the desired results from an EOR treatment analysis.
Furthermore, the test data collected on reservoir retrieved core and fluid samples must have attributes to mimic a broader set of data that is continuously acquired during logging, well testing, and seismic data gathering. The current NMR setups available lack the ability to generate data under reservoir conditions.